"Arrey baap!" Chandra Mehta puffed. Holy father! "You sound like Cliff. He's a fuckin' communist. That's one of his raves, yaar."

"I'm not a communist, or a capitalist," I said, smiling. "I'm more of a leave-me-the-hell-alone-ist. "

"Don't believe him," Lisa interjected. "When you're in trouble, he's the right man to call."

I looked at her. Our eyes held just long enough to feel good and guilty at the same time.

"Fanaticism is the opposite of love," I said, recalling one of Khaderbhai's lectures. "A wise man once told me-he's a Muslim, by the way-that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. I agree with him, and I feel the same way. I also agree with Winston Churchill, who once defined a fanatic as someone who won't change his mind and can't change the subject."

"And on that note," Lisa laughed, "let's change the subject. Come on, Cliff, I'm relying on you to give me all the gossip about the romance on the set of Kanoon. What's really going on there?"

"Yes! Yes!" Reeta cried out excitedly. "And all about the new girl. There's so much of scandal about her that I can't even say her name out loud, yaar. And everything, anything at all about Anil Kapoor! I just love him to pieces!"

"And Sanjay Dutt!" Geeta added, trembling dramatically at the mention of his name. "Is it true that you actually went to his party in Versova? Oh, my God! How I would love to be there! Tell us all about it!"

Encouraged by that febrile curiosity, Cliff De Souza spun out yarns about the Bollywood stars, and Chandra Mehta added titillating ruffles of gossip throughout. It became clear during the lunch that Cliff had an eye for Reeta, and Chandra Mehta directed much of his attention to Geeta. The long lunch was the beginning of a long day and night they'd planned to spend together. Warming to their themes, and with half their minds on the pleasures of the night to come, the movie men gradually shifted their gossip and anecdotes into the area of sex and sexual scandals. They were funny stories, sometimes straying into the bizarre. We were all laughing hard when Kavita Singh entered the restaurant. The laughter was still rippling through us as I introduced Kavita around the table.

"Excuse me," she said, with the kind of frown that climbs out of deep trouble and refuses to leave. "I have to speak to you, Lin."

"You can talk about the case here, Kavita," I offered, still bright with the laughter of a minute before. "They'll find it interesting."

"It's not about the case," she insisted firmly. "It's about Abdullah Taheri."

I stood at once and excused myself, nodding to Lisa that she should stay and wait for me to return. Kavita and I walked to the foyer of the restaurant. When we were alone, she spoke.

"Your friend Taheri is in deep shit." "What do you mean?"

"I mean that I heard a whisper from the crime staffer at the Times. He said that Abdullah is on a police hit list. Shoot on sight, he said."

"What?"

"The cops' orders are to take him alive, if they can, but to take no chances with him. They're sure he's armed, and they're sure he'll shoot, if they try to arrest him. At the slightest hesitation from him, they're ordered to shoot him down like a dog."

"Why? What's it all about?"

"They think he's this Sapna guy. They've had a solid tip-off, with solid evidence. They're sure it's him, and they're going to get him. Today. It might have happened already. You can't fuck with the cops in Bombay-not with something this serious. I've been looking for you for two hours."

"Sapna? It doesn't make sense," I said. But it did make sense. It made perfect sense, somehow, and I couldn't understand why. There were too many pieces missing; too many questions that I hadn't asked, and should've asked, long before.

"Sensible or not, it's now a reality," she said, her voice trembling in the shudder of a resigned and pitying shrug. "I've been looking for you everywhere. Didier told me you were here. I know Taheri's a good friend of yours."

"Yeah. He's a friend," I said, suddenly remembering that I was talking to a journalist. I stared at the dark carpet, and tried to find sense or direction in the sandstorm of my thoughts. Then I looked up and met her eyes. "Thanks, Kavita. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot. I'll have to go."

"Listen," she said more softly. "I filed the story. I phoned it in as soon as I heard it. If it makes the evening news, it might make the cops a little more careful. For the record, I don't think he did it. I can't believe it. I always liked him. I had a little crush on him for a while, right after you brought him to Leopold's the first time. Maybe I've still got a crush on him, yaar. Anyway, I don't think he's Sapna, and I don't think he did those... terrible things."

She left, smiling for me and crying for him at the same time. At the table, I apologised for breaking up the lunch and offered a vague excuse for leaving. Without asking her if she wanted to come, I pulled back Lisa's chair for her and lifted her handbag from the chair's high back.

"Oh, Lin, do you really have to go?" Chandra complained. "We haven't even talked about the casting-agency deal."

"Do you really know Abdullah Taheri?" Cliff asked, the faintest hint of accusation in his curiosity.

I glared at him.

"Yes."

"And you're taking the lovely Lisa with you," Chandra pouted.

"That's a double disappointment."

"I've heard so much about him, yaar," Cliff persisted. "How did you meet him?"

"He saved my life, Cliff," I said, a little more harshly than I'd intended. "The first time I met him, he saved my life, at the hash den run by the Standing Babas."

I held open the door of the brasserie for Lisa, and looked back at the table. Cliff and Chandra had their heads close together, their whispers excluding the bewildered girls.

On the bike, outside the hotel, I told Lisa everything that I knew. Her healthy tan faded suddenly and her face was pale, but she pulled herself together quickly. She agreed with me that a trip to Leopold's was logical, as a first step. Abdullah might be there, or he might've left a message with someone. She was afraid, and I felt that fear twisting in the muscles of her arms as she clung to my back. We hurtled through the ponderously slow traffic, riding on luck and instinct just as Abdullah might've done. At Leopold's we found Didier drinking himself into the liquid abyss.

"It's over," he slurred, pouring himself another whisky from a large bottle. "It's all over. They shot him dead almost an hour ago. Everyone is talking about it. The mosques in Dongri are calling the prayers for the dead."

"How do you know?" I demanded. "Who told you?"

"The prayers for the dead," he mumbled, his head lolling forward.

"What a ridiculous and redundant phrase! There are no other kinds of prayers. Every prayer is a prayer for the dead."

I grabbed the front of his shirt and shook him. The waiters, who all liked Didier as much as I did, watched me and calculated how far they would let me go.

"Didier! Listen to me! How do you know? Who told you about it?

Where did it happen?"

"The police were here," he said, suddenly lucid. His pale blue eyes looked into mine as if he was looking for something at the bottom of a pond. "They were boasting about it to Mehmet, one of the owners.

You know Mehmet. He's also Iranian, like Abdullah. Some of the police from the Colaba station, across the road, were in the ambush. They said that he was surrounded in a little street near Crawford Market. They called on him to surrender himself to them.